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Diminished Decision-Making Capacity
Published in Alexander R. Toftness, Incredible Consequences of Brain Injury, 2023
It is debated what the different executive functions have in common with one another, but they often have to do with the inhibition of behavior and reasoning abilities (Ardila, 2013). Inhibition simply means preventing yourself from doing something, like stopping yourself from drinking an alcoholic beverage even if part of your brain wants to drink it. Reasoning is a bit more difficult to define, but it is essentially following a series of mental steps to a logical conclusion. An example of this is determining that bear tracks in the mud mean that a bear has been in the area recently, and because bears are dangerous, you should leave the area. Damage to the executive functions of the brain may therefore result in disorders where a person has trouble with inhibiting behaviors and completing logical reasoning—which are both important for decision-making (Wood & Worthington, 2017). Other types of frontal lobe damage may result in symptoms that are subtle or difficult to describe, but problems with decision-making tend to be noticeably impactful on a person's life, which is why decision-making has a chapter in this book.
Functional Neurology
Published in James Crossley, Functional Exercise and Rehabilitation, 2021
The frontal lobe is one part of the brain worth noting. The frontal lobe is associated with higher-level functions, such as self-control, planning, logic and abstract thought – ‘the things that make us particularly human’ (Lewis, 2016). Humans have the largest frontal lobes of any animal.
Neurology
Published in Roy Palmer, Diana Wetherill, Medicine for Lawyers, 2020
The brain is divided into two halves. The cerebral cortex in each half is responsible for motor and sensory function on the opposite side of the body. It sits astride a central, deeply-placed portion of the brain known as the brain stem which, apart from acting as a conduit for the long nerve fibre tracts that pass to and from the spine, also contains a number of important nuclei (nerve relay stations). The cortex is divided into four lobes (on each side): frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal. The motor cortex, controlling movement, lies at the back of the frontal lobe and, immediately behind it, in front of the parietal lobe, lies the sensory section of the cortex, which is important in the perception of sensation. The primary visual area is at the back of the brain, in the occipital cortex. Speech is in the left hemisphere in right-handed people and half the left-handed population. The frontal lobe has important functions in behaviour and important cognitive ‘executive’ functions (Figure 14.1). The corollary is that focal damage to the brain often produces easily recognizable clinical syndromes.
Examining Interhemispheric PFC Connectivity during AUD Abstinence with Multilevel Modeling
Published in Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly, 2022
Spencer Bradshaw, Adam Jones, Rebecca Lucero Jones, Sterling Shumway, Thomas Kimball
Age also has a significant association with brain structure and functioning. Calso, Besnard, and Allain (2016) highlight that normal aging is associated with a decline in many cognitive abilities that are specifically associated with executive functioning and changes in the frontal lobes. Additional research has also found that aging is associated with atrophy in the medial PFC and that this atrophy is associated with sleep disruptions and leads to diminished cognitive functioning on an episodic memory task (Mander et al., 2013). Therefore, an interaction can occur between age-related and AUD-related changes in brain structure and function leading to excessive deficits for older persons with AUD (Pfefferbaum, Sullivan, Mathalon, & Lim, 1997; Zahr, Pfefferbaum, & Sullivan, 2017).
Spatial neglect treatment: The brain’s spatial-motor Aiming systems
Published in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 2022
A. M. Barrett, Kelly M. Goedert, Alexandre R. Carter, Amit Chaudhari
Our discovery that Aiming spatial neglect predicted functional recovery after receiving prism adaptation treatment led us to pursue a neuroanatomic predictor of prism adaptation response. We reasoned that neuroanatomic biomarkers may be a more feasible basis for spatial neglect treatment assignment than behavioural assessment, if the current clinical process is insensitive to spatial neglect features that predict response to prism adaptation treatment, since most patients receive brain imaging during clinical care. In the previous sections, we discussed the evidence that either frontal cortical injury, or disruption and disconnection of frontal-subcortical networks, may cause Aiming spatial neglect. Thus, we performed two studies of prism adaptation treatment for spatial neglect in which right brain stroke patients were screened for simple presence or absence of lesions anywhere in the frontal cortex (Chen et al., 2014; Goedert et al., 2020). In both of these studies, patients with frontal lesions responded better to prism adaptation treatment based on functional performance assessment with the CBS. The second study (Goedert et al., 2020) included control patients who did not receive prism adaptation therapy, to account for possible better recovery in frontal lobe-lesioned patients. Although both of these studies were small, and their results need to be confirmed before they can be broadly generalized, taken together they strongly suggest there is better response to prism adaptation therapy after frontal lobe injury.
A preliminary study of atypical cortical change ability of dynamic whole-brain functional connectivity in autism spectrum disorder
Published in International Journal of Neuroscience, 2022
The frontal lobe is responsible for a number of higher-order cognitive functions, involving planning, decision making, abstraction, etc. Hence, the frontal lobe is a primary candidate for dysfunction in many neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders. One function of the frontal lobe is cognitive control, or the coordination of goal-directed thoughts and actions. In conjunction with previous studies, serotonin acts as a neurotrophic factor early in the life and modulates axonal arborization [69]. Decreased serotonin synthesis capacity in the frontal cortex and abnormal developmental trajectories for whole-brain serotonin synthesis were observed in ASD patients [70]. Certain cognitive and behavioral deficits suggest that the frontal lobe functions abnormally in ASD patients. The abnormal GMV of frontal lobe cortex was discovered in ASD patients by MRI analysis [71]. As white matter organization abnormalities, abnormal frontal fractional anisotropy and apparent diffusion coefficient was reported in ASD patients [72]. Genetic variation at CNTNAP2 predisposes to diseases such as ASD in part through modulation of frontal lobe connectivity [73].